Food For Thought: A fast break for breakfast

It's one of those mornings when you need that fourth snooze-button sleep time and end up having 20 minutes to get ready for school. You slap on some clothes, run a brush through your hair and run out the door with only one eye open and the crease of your pillow still indented on your cheek.

When you're caught up in the busy rush to your first class in the morning, it's easy to forget to grab some food to start the day. By lunchtime you already feel tired and just want to go home and have a nap. Why is this? You haven't fueled up yet.

Breakfast is said to be the most important meal of the day. It's the first thing that goes into your body when you are waking up, and is the source of energy that your body will use throughout the day. A regular breakfast schedule will also promote a quicker metabolism as your body will be more energetic and therefore more active.

So how do you make sure you have everything you need in a healthy breakfast without spending a ton of could-be-asleep-time making it?

First, stay away from empty-carb and sugar filled breakfast items. This includes sugary cereals like Froot Loops, Pop Tarts, toaster strudels and donuts. While the sugar will give you a burst of energy at the start, it will also make you crash faster. The carbs may help to prolong your oomph but will do nothing good for your waistline.

If you do enjoy a sweeter breakfast, try a nut-filled granola cereal or something with natural sugars like fruit and honey in it.

Some easy breakfasts on-the-run are: Kashi granola bars, a bran muffin, whole fruit like bananas and apples or a yogurt. Personally, I like to take a puffed flax-seed cereal (found in the health-food isle in the Superstore) and sprinkle it in some Activia yogurt on my way out the door. It gives my yogurt some crunch and mixes a pre-biotic with a pro-biotic, which means it has both good bacterial culture and the atmosphere to help it out. The combo just makes you feel good all around. Yee-haw!

Some bad on-the run breakfast ideas would be: last week's pizza, cream filled danish, a coke, chewing gum, a hunk of cheese, or McDonalds breakfasts (I know it tastes sooo good, but it's sooo processed and greasy!)

Some of us race to school before these thoughts of food even cross our minds, and find ourselves having to hunt down a nutritious option available in the college. If you find yourself in these situations, I suggest an oatmeal raisin cookie or whole wheat and honey bagel with light cream cheese from Tim Hortons. The multigrain bagels are great too, but be aware that they have the most amount of fat in all of the choices because of all the seeds and grains. For a beverage, avoid any soda-pop and flavoured juices. Orange juice is usually the best way to go, because it is usually the most likely to be real and not overly sweetened. Read the ingredients, if the glucose-fructose is the first thing on the list, it's probably really high in calories.

After all these suggestions, the most important advice I have is just to make sure you are eating something in the morning, even if it is a bowl of Corn Pops or a cheese croissant. If you do, I think you will find it much easier to get through your homework after a long day in class.